Sunday, April 27, 2014

NTT, in partnership with Japan's National Institute of Informatics and Osaka University, announced a new approach in the development of a long-lived quantum memory that could be used in quantum computing.

The research involves a superconductor diamond quantum hybrid system in which a dark state was shown to be 150 ns, an order of magnitude longer than previous attempts to hold state. By using a gap-tunable superconducting flux qubit, the researchers were able to change the energy without decreasing the lifetime of the memory.

In November 2013, NTT announced a quantum buffer on an optical waveguide that takes advantage of the "slow light effect:, where the propagation speed of a pulsed light in a special optical waveguide slows significantly compared with the speed of light in vacuum.

The company said this innovation facilitates the precise synchronization of photons, thereby creating a buffer that could be used to create quantum computers. Experiments have shown that the buffer can slow down the speed of pulsed photons to 1/60 of the speed of light in vacuum while faithfully preserving its quantum state. The device used for this demonstration was created by NTT Basic Research Laboratories fabricated by coupling nanocavities with a total length of 840 μm using a silicon photonic crystal.

The research was published in the UK science journal “Nature Communications”.